Swahili is an African language of the Niger-Congo family. Although only a few million native speakers exist, Swahili is the lingua franca (a working language/second language among large groups of people) in many of the East African countries, where the total number of speakers exceeds 60 million. Swahili is an official language in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, and Comoros. Swahili is also spoken natively in additional countries including Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique, Oman, Rwanda, Somalia, and more. Some Swahili vocabulary is derived from Arabic through more than twelve centuries of contact with Arabic-speaking inhabitants of the coast of southeastern Africa. It has also incorporated Persian, German, Portuguese, English, and French words into its vocabulary through contact during the past five centuries.